The present invention relates to an anti-virus agent, particularly an anti-human immunodeficiency virus agent (hereinafter, abbreviated as "anti-HIV agent") aiming at prophylaxis and treatment of AIDS and, in more detail, relates to an anti-virus agent having bisnaphthalenedisulfonic acids having aliphatic spacer or their salts as effective ingredients.
Recently, same diseases caused by newly confirmed virus have come to appear and to be found, and so prophylaxis and treatment of virus diseases have increasingly become necessary. Among them, it is known that particularly HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a human retrovirus and specifically infects the helper T-cells of human to cause the immunoimpediment. Through this infection, persons get into the acquired immune deficiency syndrome and, as a result, bring death on themselves because of losing the resistance to various external infections.
Today, various compounds are proposed as anti-AIDS virus agents and developed as medicinal drugs. Among them, only one that is said to be clinically effective and actually commercialized is azido thymidine (AZT) having impeditive action to reverse transcriptase. However, it has side effects such as inhibition of the growth of bone marrow cells and it has no inhibitory activity for the fusion (formation of giant cells) of infections cells with noninfectious cells, which is a cause of destruction of immune T-cells playing an important role in the progress of AIDS symptoms. Further, now, anti-HIV agents of nucleic acid derivatives such as DDI and DDG are investigated as similar impeders to reverse transcriptase, but so much effective impeders of non-nucleic acid type to reverse transcriptase have not been found.
As the drugs having impeditive activity to infection, polysaccharide sulfates such as dextran sulfate are known (Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 2-7577), but they are not put into practice. It is probable that, because sulfonic groups form ester linkages with hydroxyl groups of sugar in them and they are susceptible to the action of sulfatase in blood to be immediately desulfonated, they cannot exert the effect. Moreover, as the high-molecular sulfonate linked sulfonic groups directly to carbon atoms, there is lignin sulfonate (Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 3-120223), but this is a polymer, phenylpropanol being polymerized at random, and has a drawback that the structure and the position of sulfonic groups introduced are not distinct.
As a result of diligent investigations to solve the problems aforementioned, the inventors have found that bisnaphthalenedisulfonic acids having aliphatic spacer and their salts have excellent anti-virus activity, particularly anti-HIV activity, leading to the completion of the invention.